Editing Lisp Machines (section)

== Struggle and decline ==
Lisp Machines, Inc. sold its first LISP machines, designed at MIT, as the LMI-CADR. After a series of internal battles, Symbolics began selling the [[Lisp machine|CADR]] from the MIT Lab as the LM-2. Symbolics had been hindered by Noftsker's promise to give Greenblatt a year's [[Head start (positioning)|head start]], and by severe delays in procuring [[venture capital]]. Symbolics still had the major advantage that while none of the AI Lab hackers had gone to work for Greenblatt, a solid 14 had signed onto Symbolics. There were two AI Lab people who choose not to be employed by either: [[Richard Stallman]] and [[Marvin Minsky]].
 
Symbolics ended up producing around 100 LM-2s, each of which sold for $70,000. Both companies developed second-generation products based on the CADR: the [[Symbolics|Symbolics 3600]] and the [[LMI-LAMBDA]] (of which LMI managed to sell around 200). The 3600, which shipped a year late, expanded on the CADR by widening the machine word to 36-bits, expanding the address space to 28-bits,<ref>{{cite conference |author=David A. Moon |title=Architecture of the Symbolics 3600 |book-title=Proceedings of the 12th annual international symposium on Computer architecture, June 17–19, 1985, Boston, Massachusetts |pages=76–83}}</ref> and adding hardware to accelerate certain common functions that were implemented in microcode on the CADR. The LMI-LAMBDA, which came out a year after the 3600, in 1983, was mostly upward compatible with the CADR (source CADR [[microcode]] fragments could be reassembled), but there were improvements in instruction fetch and other hardware differences including use of a multiplier chip and a faster logic family and [[cache memory]]. The LAMBDA's processor cards were designed to work in a [[NuBus]]-based engineering workstation, the [[NuMachine]], which had been originated by [[Steve Ward (computer scientist)|Steve Ward]]'s group at MIT, and, through a separate chain of events, was being developed by [[Western Digital]] Corporation. This allowed the popular LAMBDA "2x2" configuration whereby two machines shared one infrastructure, with considerable savings. [[Texas Instruments]] (TI) joined the fray by investing in LMI after it ran out of money,<ref>{{cite news | title = Lisp Stake Bought | newspaper = New York Times | date = 2 September 1983 | url = https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/02/business/lisp-stake-bought.html | access-date = 2 October 2013}}</ref> purchasing and relocating the NuBus engineering workstation unit from Western Digital, licensing the LMI-LAMBDA design and later producing its own variant, the [[TI Explorer]].

Symbolics continued to develop the 3600 family and its operating system, [[Genera (operating system)|Genera]], and produced the Ivory, a [[very-large-scale integration|VLSI]] chip implementation of the [[Symbolics architecture]]. Texas Instruments shrunk the Explorer into silicon as the Explorer II and later the MicroExplorer. LMI abandoned the CADR architecture and developed its own K-Machine, but LMI went bankrupt in 1987 before the machine could be brought to market.